After treading cautiously through the realm of hip-hop for nearly four decades, the Recording Academy has embraced the genre wholeheartedly in its most prestigious categories for the 60th Grammy Awards, which take place Jan. 28. The recognition is long overdue. Hip-hop has shaped music and culture worldwide for decades. In this ongoing series of stories, we track the rise, present and ever-more influential future of hip-hop.

BOTH MEN HAVE SOLD millions of albums. Both have headlined the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. And both made former President Barack Obama's list of his favorite songs from 2017 — an especially meaningful achievement, perhaps, for two African American artists eager to share their political views (not to mention their scorn for the guy who now holds Obama's old job).

So in a year when hip-hop might finally rule the Grammy Awards, it makes sense that Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar would be the rap kings closest to victory come Sunday night.

With eight nominations, Jay-Z, the assured veteran, leads the field of contenders for music's most prestigious prize, followed closely by Lamar, the upstart phenom, who has seven.

A moment of panic came over Ray Romulus during the 2016 Grammy Awards when his phone buzzed with a notification that his checking account had gone red.

“Taylor Swift is to my left. Selena Gomez is [nearby]. I can see Bruno [Mars]. I’m sitting eight rows from the stage and I turned to my wife to tell her,” Romulus remembered while looking at a screen grab of himself from the telecast — the wide smile he typically wears gone, his brow wet with sweat.

It was music’s most celebrated night, and Romulus — one-quarter of the multiplatinum songwriting and producing collective the Stereotypes — was worried about how he’d take care of his family.

BACK IN DECEMBER, in front of a sold-out audience at the Forum awaiting Grammy front-runner Jay-Z, opening act and rapper Vic Mensa vaulted onstage. Dressed in punky red leather, he was boisterous and triumphant, the show a crowning achievement in his career.

But underneath the bravado were lacerating lyrics about depression and drug addiction.

"In the cyclone of my own addiction," he rapped on his song "Wings."

Jan. 27, 2018, 8:30 a.m.

LIKE SUNSET BOULEVARD and rock or Beale Street and the blues, Compton’s Rosecrans Avenue — described in song by producer-rapper DJ Quik as “a long-ass avenue that goes from the beach to the streets” — conjures a musical essence beyond the pavement itself.

If Compton is the heart of L.A. hip-hop, Rosecrans is its pulse.

Rosecrans has played a role as an incubator for essential Los Angeles rappers such as Kendrick Lamar, Dr. Dre, YG, the Game, DJ Quik, Problem and dozens more. Since N.W.A’s 1988 album “Straight Outta Compton,” artists have long used the 27-mile-long avenue as a backdrop.

SINCE THE RISE OF RAP in the 1980s, Rosecrans Avenue in South Los Angeles and Compton has served as the music’s West Coast spiritual home. Extending 27 miles from Fullerton to its end at Pacific Coast Highway in Manhattan Beach, the street, named after a Union soldier, has been an actor in songs by Kendrick Lamar, YG, Problem, DJ Quik, 2Pac and dozens of others. Take a tour of Rosecrans Avenue, and check out our Spotify playlist.

Jan. 26, 2018, 1:15 p.m.

THE CEREMONY FOR the 60th Grammy Awards is still two weeks away, but already music’s biggest TV night has made history.

For the first time, hip-hop artists dominate the majority of nominees chosen in the academy’s top categories, including record, album and song of the year.

But that sound you’re hearing isn’t champagne corks popping in celebration. It’s exasperated sighs that the Recording Academy only just discovered what the rest of the entertainment industry noticed back in the flip-phone era: Hip-hop, once an outlier, is now the status quo.

Jan. 26, 2018, 12:20 p.m.

In hip-hop's early days, LL Cool J, seen here in New York circa 1988, was known for his Kangol hat and thick gold chain. (Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)

FOR HIS FALL2017 women’s fashion show, designer Marc Jacobs sent models down a stripped-down runway at New York’s Park Avenue Armory last February wearing tracksuits topped with thick gold chains, retro-style coats and eccentric headwear, a hat tip to hip-hop’s early days in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

Jacobs’ collection was inspired, he said, by two things: the 2016 Netflix documentary “Hip-Hop Evolution,” which chronicles the music genre’s rise from the ’70s through the 1990s, as well as memories from his own New York childhood.

“This collection is my representation of the well-studied dressing up of casual sportswear,” the designer explained in a statement. “It is an acknowledgment and gesture of my respect for the polish and consideration applied to fashion from a generation that will forever be the foundation of youth culture street style.”

Jan. 26, 2018, 3:00 a.m.

Will Smith appears in a photo from Season 1 of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air." (NBC via Getty Images)

Since the late 1970s, hip-hop has made its way from insurgent music genre to the defining cultural movement of our times. But it hasn’t been entirely about the music.

To look at fashion today is to understand that hip-hop has been an undeniable influence on the way we dress. From Run-DMC’s endorsement of Adidas and Sean Combs’ launching his own fashion label to Kanye West and Pharrell embracing the world of high-end European fashion, here’s a look at the players who led the way.

LIKE THE FICTIONAL Yoknapatawpha County where writer William Faulkner set many of his stories, the rapper and lyricist Kendrick Lamar, who is nominated for seven Grammy Awards including album of the year, has populated his hometown of Compton with stories, plots, images and recollections that map the contours of his city.

Mixing fact and fiction with rhythm and sound, Lamar since his debut mixtape in 2009 has become South L.A.'s most crucial storyteller, and he's harnessed the area's most notable corridor, Rosecrans Avenue, in service of those narratives.

Whether on tracks including "Backseat Freestyle," "Keisha's Song (Her Pain)" or "Money Trees" or in the videos for his tracks "Compton State of Mind" (a riff on Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind), "King Kunta" and "i," Lamar locates his creative world in the area in which he was raised.